This 4-year-old report shows how badly Syria spiraled out of control

The Syrian civil war is
an unstoppable cataclysm that's killed nearly a
quarter-million people and displaced around ten million more.

It's destroyed Syria's existence as a single national entity.
It's deepened Iran's strategic takeover of the northern Levant
and created the safe haven in the country's desert east that led
to ISIS's rise. At various points the violence has spilled into
Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, and Turkey.

It's the contemporary Middle East's defining event, and one of
the deadliest wars of the 21st century.

But Syria and the surrounding region were a far different place
on March 16, 2011, when Reuters' Beirut bureau
filed a brief report headlined "Rare political protest held
in Syria, witnesses say."

On January 14, 2011, popular protests had unseated Tunisian
dictator Zine el Abdin ben Ali, who ruled the country since 1989.
Less than a month later, on February 11, Hosni
Mubarak's three decades in power in Egypt came to a rapid and
dramatic close after less than a month of popular
protest. On March 17, the UN
Security Council voted to
authorize military action to protect civilians and enforce a
no-fly zone in Libya, a decision that led to Muammar Gaddafi's
ouster the following August.

The day of
that Reuters report, it seemed like just about anything was
possible in the Middle East — even in Syria, where the Assad
regime maintained one of the region's strictest police states.
But it's still jarring to go back and read that first report in
light of what actually did end up happening: a war
that's engulfed much of the region and somehow continues to get
worse.

"About 40
people joined a protest in Syria on Tuesday, chanting political
slogans, witnesses said, in the first challenge to the ruling
Baath Party since civil unrest swept across the Arab world,"
the report begins, before ominously noting that "Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad, who succeeded his father 11 years ago,
has said there is no chance the political upheaval shaking the
Arab Middle East will spread to Syria."

A Syrian protester burning
Assad in effigyap

The protestors worked their way through a marketplace in the Old
City section of Damascus, and the article states that
"A YouTube
video showed a few dozen people marching after noon prayer near
the Umayyad Mosque, clapping and chanting, 'God, Syria, freedom -
that's enough,'" a subversive take on a regime-promoted
slogan.

What happened
next is a study in authoritarian survivalism, as Assad went about
protecting himself from ben Ali and Mubarak's fate and tried his
best to prove that their country simply couldn't exist without
the regime remaining in power.

Protests
quickly spread, with 10,000 people reportedly attending a protest
in Daraa on March 19th. The regime began deploying snipers and
plain-clothes security officers to break up the protests — which
only encouraged more protest.
Over 3,500 activists had been killed by November, and by the
end of the year Syria was an incipient state of civil war.

A fighter loyal to Syria's
president Bashar Assad holds his picture as fellow fighters rest
by a Syrian national flag after gaining control of the area in
Deir al-Adas, a town south of Damascus, on February 10,
2015.Reuters

The US and
Assad ally Russia
supported a peace plan in March of 2012 that effectively
called on the opposition to lay down its
arms. With Assad refusing to
consider stepping down and the international community doing
little to affect his ouster, the country was soon split between
regime and rebel-held spheres of control, without an obvious
political solution that either side could accept. Iranian and
Shi'ite militant backing for the Assad regime throughout 2012
ensured that the conflict would take on a regional and sectarian
character, something that attracted both Shi'ite and Sunni
foreign fighters to the battlefield.

Today,
the Assad regime survives — but mostly within an urban and
coastal enclave created at an almost unfathomable human cost. For
now, ISIS and Iran appear to be the war's big winners.

None of that
was a certainty four years ago. The closing lines of Reuters'
report on one of the first protests of the Syrian uprising are a
reminder of how rapidly the situation spiraled out of control —
and of the possible world-shaking crises lurking beneath even the
most seemingly peripheral global events.

"'The date is [March] 15. . . . This is the first obvious
uprising against the Syrian regime. . . . Alawite or Sunni, all
kinds of Syrians, we want to bring down the regime,'" Reuters
reported, describing a YouTube video of the
March. "There was no reaction
from the Syrian government."